Mehmet Alpsoy

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

No, they are not. You could download FLEX SDK for free and use it with a bunch of non Adobe products like Eclipse, FDT, Flash Develop etc. Also there is Red5, Wowza for Media broadcast which use open standart RTMP protocol and Socket Servers such as ElectroServer, SmartFoxServer etc. for real time user interaction which are built on JAVA, Python and Actionscript.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Web experience is not only based on video, there are many web apps that run on Flash to achieve lots of specified goals. No need to list them all.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

And most of those 50,000 games are re-productions of Flash games. But we are talking about mobile web experience not just iPhone, iPad or iPod.  So how many games are there playable on iPhone’s Safari?

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Yes, Seteve Jobs is right at this point. Flash Player has had many major security issues and still have some. But most of them are fixed by Adobe and if you are an experienced Flash Platform Developer it is easy to keep your Flash App secure. But Adobe has to admit that leaving some of these security fixes to be done by the developer is not a good idea.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

It is obvious that if non H.264 videos do not run on Flash Player which runs on a mobile device, most publishers encode it for the appropriate codec (which is H.264) here to make them available.
Also these old generation encoded videos are still not available on Apple Mobile devices, so this excuse of jobs is not that realistic.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

If Steve Jobs opens Twitter home page, there is a hover tool tip box almost on every interactive object. So this excuse is also not reasonable. So even a web page based on HTML & Javascript, they have to be rewritten for touch experience

Tags: Actionscript, Adobe, Flash, Flash Player, FLEX, iPhone, Mac, MAC OS, Mobile, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Flash Platform, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.